International Forecaster Weekly

Privacies You Didn't Know You Lost

But for those worrying over the potential for the Big Brother police state to read your thoughts and arrest you for thought crime in real time... relax.

James Corbett | January 13, 2018

We all know that privacy is a thing of the past, right? Followers of The Corbett Report will see past the metadata lie and the PRISM limited hangout to the underlying reality of the all-pervasive Big Brother surveillance grid. CALEA and the Stellar Wind. The CIA spying on you through your dishwasher. And who can forget the dolls that spy on your children?

Heck, even the normies no longer scoff at the "conspiracy theorists" who warn that every one of your electronic gadgets is listening to everything you say and beaming that information off to third parties. Now they just think that's a good thing. I mean, how do you order a dollhouse?

But Alexa and their technocratic police state brethren are only the most obvious examples of how our privacy has been obliterated in recent years (even in our own homes). Here are three privacies you didn't even realize you lost.

1) Privacy of garbage

You know what they say: One man's trash is another man's treasure. Especially if that other man treasures information about your personal life. The idea that your garbage says a lot about you is by no means new. Archaeologists have always known that the refuse of civilizations past provide invaluable insight into their day to day lives, and modern day researchers apply that to their studies of contemporary urban life. Others have observed that if you want to know what someone is really like you should just ask their garbageman. So why wouldn't a police state hell bent on eviscerating all privacy just deputize the garbagemen to become deep state spies? 007s of the dump, as it were?

The surprising answer is that they don't have to be deputized. In fact, in case you didn't know, prosecutors have been arguing for decades that you have no right to expectation of privacy in your trash, and no special license, permit, warrant or secret agent badge is required to rummage through someone's rubbish.

This was established in memorable fashion in Portland in 2002 when the Willamette Week reported on the curious case of Gina Hoesly. She was the Portland Police Bureau officer who was a victim of a garbage raid in the 1990s...at the hands of her fellow officers. The story is as crazy as it sounds (and worth the read), but the long story short is that the local D.A., police chief and mayor all became vocal defenders of the practice of raiding the garbage of anyone under investigation for anything—a practice that had been going on for a very long time. So you'd think they would have been happy when the dedicated Willamette Week reporters dug through their trash to prove a point...but you'd be wrong.

And that was in 2002, before "the day that changed everything" had finished changing everything. As you can well imagine, things have only gotten worse since then for those hoping their garbagemen wouldn't be recruited as an army of spies in the never-ending Homeland Insecurity war of terror. Much, much worse.

2) Privacy of location

Well, you are probably vaguely aware that your personal tracking device—err...I mean, your "smart phone"—is tracking, tracing and databasing your movements at all times. (Even if you turn the GPS tracking off.) And you're probably similarly vaguely aware that that information is not just being sent back to corporate headquarters (and siphoned off by the alphabet soup agencies, of course) but also being shared with third parties in all sorts of weird ways. But you're probably not aware of just how pervasive the location spying and tracking grid is becoming.

Imagine a system where a network of facial recognition cameras across the country are connected, beaming information about your personal whereabouts to a central point where it is viewed in real time, stored for future reference, and even analyzed for possible "pre-crime" activity. Imagine those central authorities also having access to microphones embedded in the streetlamps that could listen in on your conversation. Imagine how such a system would be the dream come true of any would-be dictator with a penchant for suppressing dissent, and how impossible it would be to truly move undetected through any urban area.

Now stop imagining. These technologies already exist. The network of connected surveillance cameras is called TrapWire. Facial recognition cameras exist and could easily be linked in a TrapWire network. Microphones in the streetlamps is a thing. This is all real. Today.

No, these technologies have not all been connected in a single surveillance grid for the entire country (or the planet)...yet. That we know of, anyway. But we are already well on the way.

Consider the case of communist China, always the test case for any NWO social experiment or police state test. In this case, they are at the forefront of implementing a facial recognition camera network that, they brag, will be able to match any one of the country's 1.3 billion citizens to their ID photo within seconds.

Think it's all just empty boasting? The Big Brother Corporation (better known as the BBC) played a little game with China's CCTV network: How long could their reporter stay hidden on the streets of Guiyan before being caught by the police's facial recognition cameras? The answer? 7 minutes.

3) Privacy of thought

This one sounds like straight-up science fiction, but sadly—like so many other once-outlandish ideasit's fast becoming mundane reality: Mind-reading computers will one day ensure that even your privatest of private thoughts will no longer be so private...If the helpful technocratic servants of the police state have their way, anyway.

As you'll recall, I chose the story of the "AI body language-reading courtroom lie detector" as my technocratic story of 2017 not because I believe the tech actually works, but precisely because I think this is a PR roll-out to condition the public to accept that whatever these "mind-reading" police state gadgets tell us is The Holy Truth, just like the old-fashioned lie detectors and hair analysis and fingerprint comparisons were The Holy Truth for investigators of yore (until they were exposed as a pack of lies, that is).

But, having said that, there are real, concrete, objectively measurable steps toward "mind-reading" technology that should have you concerned. As I reported earlier, researchers at New York University and the University of California have "created a mind-reading machine that allows them to reconstruct images in a person’s mind using brain scans." The technology is as creepy as it sounds, and the results are undeniable. And that was in 2014.

The image reconstructions were followed in short order by person-to-person "mind messaging" via digital brain connection. And then machines that could decode and process what someone was looking at in real time. And then computers that could translate thoughts into words. And now, as one particularly chipper Big Tech PR site tells us, we are right on the cusp of commerically-available mind reading technology.

But for those worrying over the potential for the Big Brother police state to read your thoughts and arrest you for thought crime in real time...relax. It's all going to be used to help cripples type, just like the brain chip!...Right?

...Right?

Conclusion: So what?

As I said at the start, the normies have already started to embrace the destruction of their privacy of communication and even to buy the very tech that helps to undermine it. In the latest sign of this apocalypse, Facebook has just announced a new gadget that will come with its very own facial-recognition camera and microphones (because, evidently, relying on third-party smartphones, laptops, tablets and desktops to capture all that data was just too cumbersome).

But surely there's a line in the sand here somewhere, right? I mean, even former Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted there was a "creepy line" that Google wouldn't dare to cross.

And once people realize that with the loss of all of these privacies, from the mundane privacy of garbage to the once-inviolable privacy of thought, people will wake up to the reality of this coming surveillance grid and reject these technologies outright, right?

...Right?